Re: webwatch-l New Web Standards Advocacy Project

At 07:31 p.m. 08/09/98 -0700, Ann Navarro wrote:
>Part of the message that WSP is trying to get across, is that the demands
>of design sometimes require implementations that don't validate: in part,
>because of inconsistent support of the standards in the major browsers.
>IOW, to make a design present consistently, what otherwise might be seen as
>"bad habits" and "invalid HTML" may need to be used. 

Okay, so the WSP suggests that web authors ignore the published
vendor-neutral standards, and instead use specifics hacks just
to get around problems in implementation?

(I used a pseudo-hack on www.hwg.org's stylesheets, because Netscape's
support for CSS is ... less than robust.  However, there's nothing
invalid about it, it simply is designed to degrade gracefully.)

>WSP is not about "validation before anything else." It is about educating
>those responsible for producing user agents that the divergence in support
>for the standards results in developers jumping through hoops that cost the
>entire web community a significant investment of time and money. If all
>browsers fully supported the standards, there'd be more to the fact that
>some of these sites don't validate. 

Isn't it rather condescending to assume that browser authors
-- mainly you're talking about Netscape and Microsoft, right?
with a little attention to Lynx, Opera, and whatever else? --
need to be "educated"?  Is a whole organization necessary to reach
these people, and what exactly is WSP planning to do to make this
happen?

I know, I know, it'll be on the website tomorrow.  Hopefully I'll
find something that makes me think this isn't just another case
of "form an official sounding organization because it makes us
look more impressive, despite not having any way to accomplish the
goals we've for ourselves."

--Kynn, plugging away at being a liability

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org>
Vice President, Marketing and Outreach, HTML Writers Guild
  http://www.hwg.org

Received on Sunday, 9 August 1998 22:45:00 UTC